Chapter 3
The words hung in the air, heavy as an executioner’s axe.
Thirty days.
The Grand Equinox Assembly was precisely four weeks away. The Emperor himself would descend from the High Palace to watch the year’s finest mounts run the Gauntlet of Subjugation. Thousands of nobles would pack the terraces of the Sunken Coliseum to watch the highborn drakes shatter stone with their jaws and breathe blue lightning upon command.
To bring Pip into that arena—Pip, who couldn't even climb a two-inch manger without tumbling onto his nose—was suicide.
"Do you sign your name to that parchment, girl?" Gideon asked. His hand went to the hilt of his short-sword, his thumb tapping the pummel with casual cruelty. "Or do I press the iron into its belly right now, and let you go back to scrubbing muck?"
Oriana looked down.
At her feet, the little gray lizard twitched in its sleep, dreaming whatever small, pointless dreams runt lizards dreamed. It looked so fragile, so profoundly out of place in a world built on iron fangs and subjugation spells. If Gideon put the brand to it, the heat would consume its entire body in a matter of seconds.
She had lived her whole life in the shadows of this stone mountain, keeping her head down, watching beautiful, magnificent creatures broken until their spirits leaked out like spoiled wine, leaving only hollow weapons behind.
She was sick of watching things burn.
"I claim the thirty days," Oriana said clearly.
Gideon’s eyes flared with a brief, vicious spark of satisfaction. "Recorded."
He turned on his heel, his dark cloak swirling around his calves as he strode toward the stall door.
"Thirty days, Keeper. Keep him fat. The furnace burns cleaner when the dross has grease on its ribs."
He reached out to push open the iron-banded timber gate of the stall.
As his fingers brushed the iron latch, a strange sound echoed through the chamber—a faint, dry, grinding scrape, like two ancient stones shifting against each other deep in the earth.
Gideon paused. He frowned down at his right hand.
On his middle finger, the heavy signet ring of House Palomar—a priceless heirloom carved from the fossilized tooth of a primeval wyrm, reinforced with null-silver—bore a hairline fracture across its face. A single grain of white dust fell from the stone, settling onto the latch.
Gideon rubbed the ring with his thumb, irritation clouding his brow. "Damp rot in this place," he muttered under his breath, before shoving the gate open and striding out into the corridor, his acolytes trailing in his wake.
Their footsteps faded down the basalt hallway, swallowed by the distant, rhythmic thunder of the upper roosts.
Oriana’s knees finally gave out.
She collapsed onto the straw, her breath coming in ragged, shuddering gasps. The cold dampness of the limestone wall seeped through her thin smock, chilling her skin, but she barely felt it. Her entire body was shaking with the aftershock of adrenaline.
"What did I just do?" she whispered into the empty stall, burying her face in her hands. "What in the gods' names did I just do?"
A soft, warm pressure nudged her wrist.
Oriana lifted her head.
Pip had waddled into her lap. He had crawled onto the rough fabric of her apron, his stunted little tail curled tightly against his flank. Slowly, with an effort that seemed to exhaust his entire tiny frame, he lifted his blunt snout toward her chin.
He opened his mouth. No flame emerged. No smoke. Just that familiar, wheezing breath, smelling faintly of dried nettles.
Then, he leaned his heavy forehead against the pulse point of her wrist.
For the briefest instant—no longer than the strike of a flint—a wave of deep, astonishing warmth bloomed beneath her skin. It didn't burn. It wasn't the searing, violent heat of Gideon’s culling brands, nor the suffocating pressure of the Weyr’s domination runes.
It felt like sunlight falling across an ancient, forgotten library. It felt like dry cedar, summer dust, and an old, slumbering mountain breathing out its heat at dusk.
Oriana blinked, looking down at the creature in shock.
Pip’s milky, cataract-covered eyes were already closed again, his throat bubbling with a rhythmic, contented rasp as he nestled deeper into the folds of her apron. He looked like nothing more than a scrap of gray leather left out in the rain.
She pulled the corners of her wool apron over his shivering back, gathering him close against her chest.
"Thirty days, Pip," she murmured, her voice steadying as she rested her chin on the crown of his ugly, ridgeless head. "We have thirty days. So you had better learn how to roar."
The quarantine stall in the Sub-Level Four mews smelled of wet lime, old manure, and doom.
Every groom, skivvy, and junior apprentice gave Stall Forty-Four a wide berth. Word had rippled through the subterranean tunnels before the noon bells had finished tolling on that first day: the disgraced Vance girl had traded her hands and her skin for a thirty-day lease on a slug.
"Look at it," sneered Corin, a third-year squire wearing the gilded shoulder-cords of House Vane, leaning over the rotted timber rail. He tossed a pebble at the straw. "Can't even hold its own neck up. Hey, Oriana! When Gideon fits you with the meat-collar, make sure you ask for a quick snap. Dread-drakes like to peel their feed from the shins up."
Oriana didn't look up from her iron pot. She knelt over a bed of low-burning peat coals, slowly stirring a mash of crushed rolled oats, dried chamomile flowers, and clover honey with a split-willow spoon.
"Mind your boots, Corin," she said evenly, her voice level. "You're tracking drake-wash into my clean straw. Or did the Dragonmasters stop teaching you how to use a boot-scraper along with basic manners?"
Corin spat onto the flagstones and stalked off, his iron spurs chiming a harsh, discordant rhythm against the granite.
Down in the corner of the manger, wrapped in a nest of worn flannel petticoats and dried sweet-clover, Pip gave a wet, whistling sigh.
Oriana carried the wooden bowl over, kneeling beside the crate. "Breakfast, terror of the skies," she murmured, dipping the horn spoon into the golden mash and blowing on it until the steam died.
Pip poked his nose out from beneath the wool.
He had not grown an inch in six days. His skin remained a dull, slate-puddle gray, lacking the iridescence of the noble bloodlines. His crooked left talon still hooked inward like a dried thorn, and his blunt head seemed too heavy for his pencil-thin neck. When he smelled the mash, however, his milky, blind-looking eyes rolled upward in something resembling sheer, ancestral ecstasy.
He did not eat like a beast.
Normal hatchlings threw themselves upon meat with snapping jaws and guttural shrieks, tearing raw sheep-flank into ribbons until their talons were slick with grease.
Pip opened his misaligned beak, took the spoon with delicate, trembling precision, and licked the chamomile broth with the measured pace of an elderly archivist sipping tea in a draughty scriptorium.
"Good?" Oriana asked, brushing a crumb of dried clover from his snout.
Pip let out a soft *thrum*. It was not a growl, nor a purr. It sounded like the low vibration of a bass cello string plucked in an empty cathedral.
